INDIANS

The pre–Civil War period of American history confirmed the determination of the American people to deprive Indians of their land regardless of treaty obligations, civil law, and humanity. Removal was the great fact of this period and the great political issue of the 1830s, given irresistible momentum by Andrew Jackson's election to the presidency in 1828, an event followed by the government's adoption of a policy to relocate the remaining eastern Indians across the Mississippi. Over and over a sad drama was enacted in which a tribe pleaded to be spared this deracination while the government urged willing compliance upon it. When that failed, the Indians would be forcibly removed with great suffering and loss of life. In major Indian wars of the period, Black Hawk War in Illinois and contiguous states (1832) and the Seminole Wars in Florida (1817–1818, 1835–1842, 1855–1858), Indian allies fought and died with government troops, thinking that their service would spare them from removal. They were treated no better than the defeated enemy. The Potawatomi chief who predicted ruin to tribes who warred against whites might have expanded his prophecy to include those who did not go to war as well. Hostile or peaceful, all were required to vacate the lands east of the Mississippi. As Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) wrote of this history in her landmark study, A Century of Dishonor (1881), "Every year has its dark stain. The story of one tribe is the story of all, varied only by differences of time and place" (p. 337).

THE TRAIL OF TEARS

The most flagrant example was the removal of the Cherokees from Alabama and Georgia. Early in the century this Indian nation had made a conscious decision to adopt every aspect of white American culture. The Cherokees became successful farmers (and slave-holders), converted to Christianity, and developed a written language. Soon they had a high rate of literacy. Their newspaper, the Phoenix, printed on their own press, was the first to appear in both English and a Native American language (1828). The usual racist arguments that the Cherokees were incapable of living as whites lived fell before such evidence, yet the states insisted that the Cherokees must go. While they tried to protect their land and possessions from impatient marauders, the Cherokees sought every remedy to avoid dispossession, including the courts, but when the Supreme Court ruled in their favor on 3 March 1832, President Jackson (1767–1845) refused to enforce the decision, falsely maintaining to the Indians that the federal government had no authority to prevent depredations against them. Jackson was more responsive to ultimatums made to him by the southern states and to the logic of population. Without federal protection, the 22,000 Cherokees could not resist the will of more than 300,000 Alabama and Georgia whites. Jackson's reelection by a large margin in 1832 ratified on the national level this will to implement the expulsion, which was then carried out under military supervision. Although other southern tribes had already been transferred under conditions of extreme hardship, no effort was made to avoid the same mistakes during the Cherokee migration, known to history as the Trail of Tears (1838–1839). As a consequence, 4,000 Cherokees died.

The Trail of Tears was simply the culminating episode in a familiar pattern. All Indians were strongly attached to their homelands; they had to be deceived, pressured, or coerced into moving—giving the lie to the promise of the Indian Removal Act (1830) that force would not be used to effect their departure. Inevitably they were moved, unable to oppose the surging white population that had the power to carry out its designs.

In his surrender speech after the Black Hawk War, Chief Black Hawk (1767–1838), a Sauk Indian, noted bitterly that "an Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and eaten up by the wolves" (McLuhan, p. 141). In truth, Indians were poorly prepared to engage such a formidable enemy as white America. Accustomed to living in small communities, they could never make common cause to the extent necessary to mount an effective resistance. Whites exploited tribal enmities, divided tribes into factions, and introduced vices that weakened the Indians' resolve and the fabric of their societies. Alcohol, in particular, reduced Indians to helplessness and tractability. Whether or not whites employed more reprehensible tactics, such as deliberately bringing smallpox and other epidemic diseases into Indian villages, as has so often been asserted, many hated Indians enough to be indifferent to the means used to clear the coveted land of their presence.

Ye say they all have passed away, 

That noble race and brave, 

That their light canoes have vanished 

From off the crested wave; 

That 'mid the forest where they roamed, 

There rings no hunter's shout; 

But their name is on your waters, 

Ye may not wash it out.

VIOLENCE

By the 1840s, with Indians now a negligible presence in the eastern United States, the tide of westward settlement beyond the Mississippi began to exert pressure on Indians farther west. Here occurred what was arguably the greatest atrocity, the Massacre of Sand Creek in Colorado Territory (1864). Volunteers under the command of an ambitious zealot, Colonel John Chivington (1821–1894), attacked a peaceful band of southern Cheyenne camped close to Fort Lyon by the authority of the military. When Chivington's men withdrew, more than two hundred Indians, mostly women and children, had been killed, many revoltingly mutilated. Indian anger over this outrage sparked reprisal raids, but the federal government could not fully address the suffering of the settlers until the war ended. At Medicine Lodge, Kansas, a huge gathering of five southern Plains tribes met government representatives in the fall of 1867. In return for relocating on reservations, the Indians were promised various goods, including badly needed food, but a typical cultural misunderstanding resulted in a continuing state of hostilities rather than peace: while the treaty made its slow way through the political process, the Indians, having expected to receive the promised items immediately, felt angry and betrayed. They began attacking and burning settlements. In response, the army sent a former Civil War hero, George Armstrong Custer (1839–1876), against a Cheyenne winter encampment on the Washita River. A well-known advocate for peace, Chief Black Kettle (b. 1807) was among those killed in the ensuing battle (1868). Custer would later be best remembered for the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), at which he and five companies of his regiment were killed by Lakota Sioux and allied tribes.

To the north the Sioux, led by the militant Oglala chief Red Cloud (c. 1822–1909), enjoyed the greatest success against white immigration. Red Cloud's repeated attacks on the Bozeman Trail, including an ambush that killed eighty soldiers from Fort Phil Kearney, Wyoming Territory, led the government to agree to abandon the three forts it had placed along the trail (1868). Like the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Red Cloud's War was only a momentary victory for the Indians. It was in this western theater of Indian-white conflict that a remark made by General Philip Sheridan (1831–1888) became instantly popular as a serious statement: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Repeated waves of immigration released by the end of the Civil War in 1865 created the same conditions that had dispossessed and destroyed eastern Indians: in the decade after 1860 a million white settlers had crossed the Mississippi; in the decade after 1870 some two and a half million joined them. The major western Plains tribes—the Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, and Arapaho—would all be subdued by force or hunger.

RACISM

Although racism played a part in the removal of Indians, the country tolerated other nonwhite races confined to inferior positions. Two factors made its relations with Indians different. First and foremost was the desire for Indian land: the growing nation, which Jefferson had envisioned existing between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, ultimately comprehended a continental expanse. This set the stage for the final thrust of Manifest Destiny that would place all Indian tribes on out-of-the-way reservations and permanently end their threat to the United States. Second, whereas other racial communities aspired to better terms of inclusion in American society, Indians remained radically unassimilated, preferring their own cultures to those of the settlers.

It was rare for either party to bridge cultural and linguistic gulfs in a systematic or meaningful way. The white world officially prohibited all forms of miscegenation, although it tacitly tolerated a fair number of white men having relationships with Indian women in the fluid space of the frontier. Indians seldom thrived in the communities of the dominant culture; some white men, however, were strongly attracted to the Indian way of life.

Given the rapid disappearance of Indians from the United States proper, Americans could readily believe that the continent's indigenous inhabitants were a vanishing race, withering away before the superior whites. An emerging "scientific" racism bolstered such views, which would gain momentum as the century progressed. Proponents argued that Indians were genetically incapable of civilization: whatever improvements occurred were due to interbreeding with whites. Samuel Morton's influential Crania Americana (1839) used his measurement of skulls to assert that the Indians (like other nonwhites) belonged to an inferior race. His compilation of cranial data convinced the eminent scientist Louis Agassiz that this conclusion had been empirically established. Josiah Nott and George Gliddon reiterated the denigration of the Indian in their huge and widely read compendium, Types of Mankind (1854). The views of scientific racism were also transmitted by historians such as Francis Parkman (The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 1851) and Lewis Henry Morgan (The League of the Iroquois, 1851) and by the writers of a new kind of American fiction.

INDIANS IN FICTION

Reduced to a powerless remnant in reality, Indians would now become part of a nationalistic branch of Romantic literature that saw their displacement as a critical episode in the settlement of the New World. Ironically, while they were fictionalized as figures of power, either as noble or ignoble savages, eastern Indians increasingly lived the marginalized and hand-to-mouth lives of a poverty-stricken minority. Their circumstances would spread westward along with the arrival of white settlers.

The first work to capitalize on Indians as a Romantic subject was Yamoyden, A Tale of the Wars of King Philip: in Six Cantos (1820), a narrative poem written by James Wallis Eastburn (1797–1819) and Robert Sands (1799–1832). One of the country's most influential critics, John G. Palfrey (1796–1881), hailed Yamoyden as fulfilling nationalistic aspirations to use early American history in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels were enormously popular in the United States. Palfrey, who elsewhere had denigrated the Wampanoag leader King Philip as ignorant and barbarous, objected to the presentation of Indians as noble savages in Yamoyden, although the poem imposes the standard conclusion of racial conflict by killing its Indian protagonist, Yamoyden, along with his white wife. Like many "good Indians" in the novels that followed this epic poem, Yamoyden gives his life to save a white person.

The novels with Indian characters that began to appear in the 1820s often borrowed a narrative framework from earlier nonfictional accounts of Indian captivity. These had found large audiences from the late seventeenth century when Mary White Rowlandson's story of her captivity (1682) became the first American best-seller. During the eighteenth century, however, the captivity became stylized and reified, with obligatory episodes and conventions. Many purportedly true histories were, if not outright inventions, undoubtedly heightened for greater effect. By the time of its appropriation by nineteenth-century novelists, the captivity narrative needed the revitalization that the freer treatment of acknowledged fiction could give it.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) perfected the form of the frontier romance in his Leatherstocking Tales (1823–1841), a popular series of fictions built around a frontiersman protagonist, Natty Bumppo, and his noble Indian companion, Chingachgook. The cast of characters included a white hero and heroine and assorted villains, both red and white. Many of the novels' "good" characters were captured by "bad" Indians, who were usually extravagantly described as blood-drinking devils. The action of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the most ambitious of these tales, is driven by serial captivity married to a Romantic plot that requires the union of hero and heroine as well as the defeat of the enemy Indians.

Later in the century western settlers often blamed Cooper, as the foremost of a large group of contemporary writers, for a romanticized image of Indians that they found to be inaccurate to frontier experience. But this widely held view was unfair: the Romantic tradition in which Cooper wrote dominated American literature until the Civil War. Moreover, whether friend or foe, his Indians were always decisively portrayed as inferior. Like most of his countrymen at the time, Cooper stresses what he regards as differences between Indians and whites rather than a common humanity. Each race has its "gifts" or special abilities: Indians are proficient in wilderness skills, for example, whereas whites are masters of technology. Not surprisingly, because Cooper was a white author writing for white readers, his Indians can never fully acquire white habits and abilities and thus are doomed to extinction, but white characters can best the Indian on his home ground. Cooper has survived where so many of his contemporaries in the genre are unknown today because he transcends his predictable plots and racial stereotypes with a poetic sensitivity to the vanishing wilderness.

Two other writers of notable frontier romances, Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867), have been rehabilitated by the work of feminist recuperation. In Child's Hobomok (1824) a white woman whose fiancé appears to have been lost at sea proposes marriage to a noble Indian, the title character. The novel treats this union as anomalous from its bizarre beginning in the heroine's superstitious ritual to its end when the missing hero reappears and (re)claims her. Although Hobomok and his wife have had a child, he willingly relinquishes his family and simply disappears. His son is educated at Harvard and Cambridge, retaining—one can assume—no trace of his Indian heritage. Child's substitution of assimilation for genocide was extraordinary for her time. Although she became better known as an abolitionist, Child retained an interest in Indians, criticizing their treatment by the Puritans in The First Settlers of New-England (1828) and returning to the subject late in life with An Appeal for the Indians (1868). Sedgwick's popular novel Hope Leslie (1827) is even more exceptional in allowing a white woman, the victim of captivity, to marry an Indian and reject white civilization, yet not die. She and her husband are the only interracial couple in the frontier romance to be granted a happy ending, although their union produces no new generation, perhaps because of the prevailing view that the offspring of mixed-race unions combined the worst of both races. In any case this woman is not the novel's white heroine. Sedgwick's treatment of Magawisca, the good Indian maiden, is more conventional. She loves the white hero but understands that their different races must keep them apart.

If in the frontier romance both good and bad Indians generally die at the end—in keeping with the popular assumption that whatever their individual qualities, they belonged to a dying race—in one subgroup of this fiction a protagonist dedicates himself to tracking down and killing Indians. This single-minded devotion to genocide is explained as the result of a family trauma inflicted by Indians, at times the killing of parents and siblings, at others of wife and children. Such works as Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837) and James Hall's account of the historical Colonel John Moredock in Sketches of the West (1835), the source of Herman Melville's Indian hater episode in The Confidence-Man (1857), represent a central figure who lives like an Indian in order to hunt Indians. In keeping with the overriding superiority of whites, the Indian hater surpasses his quarry in seeking revenge, stalking, and killing—as well as in "wilderness skills"—and in so doing, relinquishes some of his acculturation as a white man. Driven by a compulsion to kill Indians that only ends with his death, the Indian hater cannot be contained within his own frontier society. Nevertheless, he embodies its feelings and values: he acts on the communal belief system about Indians that has produced him.

Outside the frontier romance, there were literary figures of stature whose attitude toward Indians was sympathetic. Among writers of fiction, Melville (1819–1891) is preeminent in portraying Indians as worthy of respect, whereas Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) often represents them as victims of Puritan intolerance. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) had a lifelong fascination with Indians, and Washington Irving (1783–1859) wrote an impassioned defense of King Philip as a warrior whose heroic qualities and achievements merited the respectful treatment of poets and historians. But Irving also realized that a truthful account of New World settlement, one that emphasized the "dark story" of wrongs done to Indians, would challenge the investment of white readers in the desirability of a settled Christian people supplanting nomadic heathens and in the greatness of the country's pioneer forebears.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) created the most popular version of the American Indian as noble savage with his long poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), modeled on the Finnish epic Kalevala. Longfellow adapted legends and myths from the pioneering work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, published in various volumes of Algic Researches. Longfellow's Hiawatha exists in prehistory; when the white man appears in his country, he gracefully withdraws, in keeping with the widely held American belief that Indians would simply die out.

INDIAN WRITERS

Belonging to oral cultures, Indians left little trace as writers during this time, but their eloquence as speakers was often preserved in school textbooks. American children were especially familiar with the poignant farewell address of Chief Logan, who lamented with stark simplicity the massacre of his entire family. One exceptional case deserves mention: in a five-year period, a Pequot Indian named William Apess (1798–1839) published five works, including an autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and a eulogy on King Philip (1836) that compares the Indian leader to George Washington. Apess liberated himself from servitude and parlayed his scanty education into a career as a Methodist minister, a writer, and an activist instrumental in securing the right of self-government to the Mashpee Pequots. The rest of Apess's life has left no historical trace. Scholarly interest in recuperating minority experience may unearth more evidence of Apess and bring to light nineteenth-century texts written by other Indian writers (a few exist in manuscript).

See also Captivity Narratives; Cherokee Memorials; Ethnology; Hope Leslie; Indian Wars and Dispossession; "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man"; Leatherstocking Tales; Native American Literature; The Song of Hiawatha; Trail of Tears

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Apess, William. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Edited and with an introduction by Barry O'Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Child, Lydia Maria. Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians. 1824. Edited and with an introduction by Carolyn L. Karcher. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor. 1881. St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1964.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie. 1827. Edited by Mary Kelley. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Secondary Works

Barnett, Louise K. The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975.

Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.

Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Jaskoski, Helen, ed. Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Krupat, Arnold. "Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self." In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, pp. 171–194. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

McLuhan, T. C., ed. Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstrey, 1971.

Rogin, Michael Paul. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

Louise Barnett